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THE VALUE OF A GREAT 
HERITAGE 



AN ADDRESS 5Y 

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

BEFORE 

THE WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION 
OF NEW JERSEY 

Witk Greeting kj WILLARD W. CUTLER, President 
and Proceedings in tke Celebration 

AT WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS 

IN MORRIsfoWN, N. J. 
ON FEBRUARY 22, 1921 



.4 



^'5^4?>: 




Of 







ADDRESSES 

Before tke Members aud Guests o{ tke 

WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION OF NEW JERSEY 



AT WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS, 

MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY, 

FEBRUARY 22, 1921. 

HONORABLE WILLARD W. CUTLER, Vice President, 
called the meeting to order and said: We will rise and open 
the exercises of the afternoon by singing "America;" you will 
find it on the leaflets that have been distributed through the 
audience. 

After th6 singing Mr. Cutler continued : Members of the 
Washington Association and guests: While your president is 
absent he has not forgotten this gathering, and I am in receipt 
of a letter from him in which he says: "I regret exceedingly 
that I cannot be with you next Tuesday and that I cannot have 
the privilege of shaking hands with our friends of the Wash- 
ington Association and of hearing our distinguished guest, Dr. 
Fosdick. Please give them my cordial greetings." 

In his absence I have the honor of presiding and welcom- 
ing you to these grounds and to the house where the Father of 
this Country made his headquarters during the time that the 
Revolutionary Army was in the vicinity of Morristown. Little 
did Washington think when he threw in his lot with the people 
in their struggle for liberty that he was establishing a nation 
which would become a world power. He was living at ease and 
in comfort in his home in Virginia, but he left it all to undergo 
hardships and privations, and years of anxiety and perplexity; 
he heard the call of duty and threw himself heart and soul into 
the cause which he espoused. It was not for personal gain, or 
place, that he undertook this step, but he was giving his all 



that others might enjoy lives of liberty and freedom. At that 
time he was misunderstood by some. He had to contend with 
jealousy and petty spite among subordinates in the army, but 
as time went by his true character stood out in bold relief, and 
to-day all over this broad land a people are observing a holiday 
in honor of a man who fearlessly did what he thought was 
right. 

You all have, I hope, enjoyed a pleasant hour of social 
intercourse and partaken of the lunch and are now anticipating 
listening to the eloquent speaker who is to address you. I do 
not intend to take up your time with any extended remarks, 
for I know you feel like the jurymen who for two days had list- 
ened to a very dry and uninteresting case and when one 
of the attorneys arose to make his final address 
and began by saying, "The Court has allowed me forty-five 
minutes in which to present my case, but it is so plain that I 
can do it in five minutes," one of the jurymen interrupted him 
and said, "Then why don't you do it and let us hear something 
that is more interesting." 

Your trustees have in the past endeavored to vary this 
occasion. You have heard college professors. United States 
senators, an ex-president of the United States, an ex-governor 
of our own state, an eminent lawyer and many other prominent 
men, and to-day I have the pleasure of introducing to you that 
eminent divine, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, of New 
York City, who has selected for his theme, "The Value of a 
Great Heritage." 



"THE VALUE OF A GREAT HERITAGE" 
An Address by Harry Emerson Fosdick, D. D. 

Dr. Fosdick said: 

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen : 

I appreciate very much this cordial welcome on this unique 
occasion, although, of course, the complimentary remarks of 
the previous speaker have always to be taken in a Pickwickian 
sense, since he is a toastmaster. Toastmasters always remind 
me of a spinster whose matrimonial affairs were of very great 
interest in the community in which she lived, chiefly because 
they were always promising but were never consummated. One 
day the rumor did get around the town that she actually was 
engaged, and a friend met her on the street, embraced her with 
overflowing warmth and said, "I hear that you are engaged;" 
to which the spinster replied, "There is not a word of truth in 
it, but thank God for the rumor!" When, therefore, I hear a 
toastmaster on an occasion like this pay compliments I am sure 
that there is not a word of truth in it, but I thank God for the 
rumor! (Laughter.) 

I am particularly gratified to find myself in the presence 
of so many real Americans in the vicinity of New York City. 
(Applause and laughter.) When my friends come from 
Europe and cast aspersions upon America's life as revealed in 
New York I always tell them that New York City is not an 
American city; it is a European city and I wonder why they do 
not like the people that came from the same place that they 
came from. I am peculiarly gratified today to find that actually 
in the vicinity of New York City there are as many Simon pure 
and real Americans as this. To be sure, I understood that it is 
possible for people who want to do so to make fun of us who 
belong to ancestral societies and cherish shrines like this to 
which we make our pilgrimage. They tell a story that to a 
village in Arabia there came one day a lineal descendant of the 
prophet; whereupon the city fathers held a council and went 
out and slew the lineal descendant of the prophet, not because 
they had anything against the lineal descendant of the prophet 
but because they thought on the whole it would be best for the 
greatest number that that village should have a holy tomb 
where they could worship and to which pilgrimages could be 



6 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

made. That kind of story is always kept conveniently in the 
vest pockets of those who through circumstances over which 
they have no control are unable themselves to belong to ancest- 
ral societies. When Dante made his memorable trip to hell, 
he found an aristocrat of Florence in a burning coffin, wrapped 
in a winding sheet of flame; but, with a ruling passion strong 
not only in death but in hell, he lifted himself up before he 
would condescend to engage in conversation with Dante and 
said, "Who are your ancestors?" While I recognize the 
possibility of such a snobbish perversion of the sort of interest 
we represent here this afternoon, for my part I am frankly 
proud of my ancestry. My great, great, great, great grand- 
father, for example, was expelled from the Puritan Colony in 
Massachusetts, not because he was a bad man, I assure you, 
but because he insisted on reading heretical books. Most of my 
ancestors since then have been blacksmiths and we have at 
home in the family museum at least one Indian tomahawk 
which was left at the family forge and was never called for. 
My grandfather was a village carpenter and shoemaker and, 
as he worked, he propped a Latin book in front of him and he 
learned the declension of Latin nouns and the conjugation of 
Latin verbs to the tap of a cobbler's hammer on the pegs, and 
before he was through he was the superintendent of education 
of the City of Buffalo. (Applause). I come to you today, 
therefore, with a rather typical American lineage, one of the 
first generations of Fosdicks in the history of the world that 
ever put on a cutaway coat, and quite as proud as any king 
upon his throne could be at the thought of the heritage that 
has been handed down to me. In this country while it is pos- 
sible then for men, if they will, to pervert the sort of thing we 
represent here today, 1 wonder if there ever was a time in the 
history of America when there was more need for everybody 
with a serious and affectionate devotion to the institutions of 
the country, to come to a conscious recognition of the possible 
peril in which those institutions stand and a deliberate resolu- 
tion to see to it that they do not fail. 

To be sure, it is possible for a youth to grow up in America 
and not know much about the institutions of the country, even 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 7 

though he is still sustained by the civic and social securities 
which they provide. So for centuries mankind lived in the 
universe and did not know the truth about it, but still the rains 
refreshed them and the sun warmed them and the stars guided 
their wandering boats. It is a pity, however, for a man to live 
unconsciously sustained by unrecognized sources of service. 
A man can go about in this country sustained by the civic safe* 
guards provided in the Constitution and perhaps never stop 
to think that there is a Constitution. Then some day he be- 
gins to grow up, perhaps through the agency of a meeting like 
this. It begins to dawn on him what it meant to secure the 
Constitution in the first place. The day grows vivid in his 
remembrance when the ratification of the federal Constitution 
was at stake in New York State and Alexander Hamilton 
fought the great battle there. Three times they voted and 
three times by an overwhelming majority the vote went against 
the ratification of the Constitution. Once more Hamilton 
girded himself with his matchless logic and went down into 
the arena. "What news shall I take to New York?" said a 
friend of his leaving Poughkeepsie for the city. "Say," said 
Hamilton, "that this convention will never rise until the con- 
stitution has been ratified." (Applause) 

It is a great thing for our youths to gain a clear under- 
standing of what it has cost to give us what we possess. That 
battle, for instance, in the House of Virginia Burgesses over 
the ratification of the Constitution never would have been won 
if George Washington had not written a certain letter to 
Randolph. Washington did many great services for his country 
but I wonder if he ever did one individual thing that weighed 
so heavily in the total result as that fine, irenic, but unbending 
letter which he wrote to Randolph which swung Randolph with 
all his influences over to the ratification of the Constitution. 
We need ever more vividly to keep the memory of this history 
that lies behind our institutions because there are too many 
people in this country now who have not caught the spirit of 
the enterprise. Of all the Pilgrims, I think John Alden in- 
terests me most, chiefly because he was not a Pilgrim ; that is, 
he had never been at Leyden; he never intended to go on the 



8 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

Mayflower. He was a cooper and they picked him up by acci- 
dent in Southampton because they needed somebody to make 
barrels for them. They hired him to go in the Mayflower. 
But he caught the spirit of the enterprise and before he got 
through he was acting governor of the colony and a spiritual 
force of quite incalculable magnitude. How many people in 
this country, some born here, some arriving here through 
Ellis Island, are American outwardly but have not yet caught 
the spirit of the enterprise that is represented in our historic 
institutions! 

Far be it from me to strike a reactionary note today. I 
am a long sea mile from a reactionary. In the sixteenth cen- 
tury the great question was the church. The reformation was 
on and all the vital perplexities of human minds centered 
there. In the eighteenth century the great question was 
politics; democracy was rising; the American and French re- 
volutions were breaking loose and all the deepest perplexities 
that concerned the human mind had there their fountain and 
their spring. In the twentieth century the vital question is in 
the economic and international realm and, mark it, just as in 
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries they could not get 
through without enormous changes, neither will we in the 
twentieth. The changes will come but let this also be said: 
the changes that come must come a la America and not a la 
Russia. (Applause.) 

Today I am interested to note that this sort of celebra- 
tion here at Washington's Headquarters symbolizes, as it seems 
to me, certain fundamental needs in the thinking of our people 
and I venture to call them to your attention. In the first place, 
I have already suggested one : a new consciousness of the price 
at the cost of which our privileges have been purchased. Too 
many of us stroll into life and take its opportunities and privi- 
leges for granted as though they belonged to us in fee simple 
to possess. We are like people that never have seen any flag 
except a brand new flag unspoiled by battle. We lack the 
sobering experience that comes to men when first they see a 
battle flag rent by shot and slit with sabre stroke, a flag whose 
soiled dishevelment symbolizes the sacrifice that makes a brand 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDTCK, D. D. 9 

new flag a possibility. One of the most sobering and chasten- 
ing- experiences that can come to any man is to wake up to the 
fact that he cannot take any common blessing of our civic life 
and trace it far back without coming to blood upon the trail. 
How often would a man like to take these easygoing, selfish 
batteners upon the securities and privileges of our land, and 
back them into a corner where they could not get away and try 
to make them see what some of these things have cost. From 
that day when the French peasants, scared to death because 
they had presented a petition to the king, stood before Louis 
saying, "Sire, what are our opinions?" what has it cost to 
build a democracy, where, with all its faults, our opinions in 
the long run are yet the makers of the government? From 
those days when James the First said about the Puritans, "I 
will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land," 
what has it cost to win liberty until today conformity in relig- 
ious opinion is the last thing that any of us think of or desire? 
In my summer home on the Maine coast there is a beauti- 
ful strip of land called Popham Beach, where in 1607, thirteen 
years before the Pilgrims came, a groupe of English commer- 
cial gentlemen founded a settlement. It lasted for just one 
year; for one winter only did they bear the biting cold and 
loneliness of separation from their homes, the fear of the 
hostile savages. They had come for money and it was not 
worth what it cost. I never sail past Popham Beach in my 
motor boat in the summer without thinking of that other 
settlement where neither loneliness nor bitter cold nor fear of 
hostile savages could break their determined will. How splen- 
didly those words of Elder Brewster ring out : "It is not with us 
as it is with others whom small things can discourage and small 
discontentments make us wish ourselves at home again!" 
There is not a thing we have that has not been bought and paid 
for by the sacrifice of men like that and as soon as a man wakes 
up to it something grips his honor. He is under an unpayable 
indebtedness and he never can give to the country any tithe 
of what the country has given to him. On a day like this I 
think I hear our ancestors appealing to us and saying: **We 
did our best; we pushed this cause just as far as our finger- 



10 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

tips would reach before we fell on sleep. Now we are counting 
on you. Everything- we dreamed and for which we laid down 
our lives, poured out our blood and tears, is in your hands. 
If you fail we fail." I wish that all over the country that 
gospel could be preached to our youths until they would stand 
up with a united phalanx and sacrifice spirits determined that 
what the fathers planned never should fail. (Applause.) 

In the second place, there is another deep need in our 
nation that is represented by a gathering like this, the preser- 
vation of the memory of those heroes of our national history 
around whom our admiration chiefly gathers. Was ever a 
people blessed as we are blessed in having two such outstand- 
ing personalities as Washington and Lincoln? I love the French. 
I am glad we had a chance to pay back a little of that debt we 
owed. (Applause) I remember once in France I wandered over 
the hills from Gondrecourt to a little place called Domremy, 
where Jeanne D'Arc was born. I saw the fields where she fed 
her sheep and the winding river where she watered them and 
the hills where she walked and saw visions of gleaming angels. 
Then I went into the little church where Jeanne D'Arc once 
offered up her maiden orisons and there in the chancel of 
Jeanne D'Arc's church were the Stars and Stripes, and over 
the hills you could hear in the dead of the night the distant 
boom of the guns where our men were guarding the land she 
loved from the desecration of the enemy. (Applause) I love 
France, but there is one place where I feel a little sorry for her. 
It is when I stand before the tomb of Napoleon with all its 
imperial pomp and glory. Think how, without any fault of 
theirs, just by the force of circumstances, the national admi- 
ration of the French has had to cluster around that scoundrel. 
Napoleon the First! Standing there by the tomb of the great 
Napoleon, I could not keep my imagination from reaching 
back across the seas to the two men who have been elevated 
into the center of our admiration — as great in character as 
they were in achievement, as splendid in conscience as they 
were in fortune. We must have thought of that these few 
days past when once more across the long century filled with 
the most amazing discoveries that the human mind has ever 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 11 

made, filled with the most thrilling and tumultuous events 
through which humanity has ever passed, our imaginations 
have turned to that winsome leader coming out of a log cabin 
in the middle west. Lincoln was a lawyer, but there were other 
lawyers greater than he; Lincoln was a politician, but there 
were others keener than he; Lincoln was a strategist, but there 
were others more skillful than he; Lincoln was a statesman, 
but there were others as comprehensive as he. That attraction 
in him that draws our attention back with a fascination that 
no mere superficial skill or aptitude of mind ever can explain 
is the amazing impress made upon the world by his simple, 
honest, elemental manhood. He lived through the most bitter, 
vindictive era of our nation's life where everybody suspected 
everybody and yet when it was all over his physician could 
say, "Lincoln was the purest hearted man I ever knew." 
(Applause) And his secretary of war could say, "I never 
heard him say a thing that was not so," and James Russell 
Lowell at Harvard could sing: "His clear grained human 
worth And brave old wisdom of sincerity." By the very cir- 
cumstances of his life he was stripped of all those coverings 
which might have disguised the plain robustness of his char- 
acter. He was no Gothic cathedral with balanced thrusts and 
delicate tracery and colored glass — more like a pyramid, he, 
simple and solid and plain. As Disraeli said about him, Dis- 
raeli, who was his very opposite, polished where Lincoln was 
plain, astute where Lincoln was simple, subtle where Lincoln 
was sincere, as Disraeli said about him, "Something in him so 
homely and so innocent that it lifts the question, as it were, out 
of all the pomp of politics and the ceremonial of diplomacy 
and touches the very heart of nations." Such is one of the men 
around whom, by God's grace, we have the right to let our 
national affections gather. 

Oftentimes there is too sharp a contrast drawn between 
Lincoln and Washington. Lincoln, we know, roughed it. We 
recall well that he used to work for thirty-one cents a day and 
that he said the first time he ever got a dollar a day added a 
dignity to his life from which he never recovered. We recall 
well how he borrowed Weems' "Life of Washington," and put 



12 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

it between the chinks of the logs one night and, waking in (he 
morning, found that it had been rained on, and then worked 
three days husking corn to pay for it. We know these things 
about Lincoln, but Washington we often picture in silk clothes, 
living in aristocratic ease. Silk clothes? He knew far more 
about buckskin than he did about silk. He was the younger 
son of the family. It was the older brother who was sent to 
England to get an education and concerning whom we hear 
little more. George Washington was the best Indian fighter 
in his colony! At nineteen he stood before the House of Bur- 
gesses in Virginia to receive the thanks of the State for his 
protection against Indians. Shy and modest, he could not even 
bring himself to say, "Thank you," and escaped to the woods 
again. 

We make another contrast that is not altogether true be- 
tween Lincoln and Washington, namely in point of humor. 
We know how humorous Lincoln was, how he took refuge in 
it; how when he caught the small-pox he said, "Go out and get 
all the office seekers; I have got something I can give them 
now." (Applause and laughter.) But against this deep strain 
of humor in Lincoln we have a picture of Washington, very 
solemn and sedate. Of course, Washington did have an innate 
dignity that we glory in, but then he was not so sedate as he 
has been made out to be. Here is a fair sample of the thing 
they have done to Washington. He actually said once, "A 
hundred thousand men are not worth a flea bite," but his 
literary executor, thinking that was not exalted enough in tone 
for the father of his country, put it down thus: "One hundred 
thousand men is totally inadequate." We forget that someone 
said of him that he had a laugh like a great bell, a little hard to 
get started, but when it was started you could hear it over a 
whole country. To be sure, he called his mother "Honorable 
Madam." To be sure, when you read some of his letters you are 
reminded of the remark made about Samuel Johnson that he 
never could write a story about little fishes because he always 
would make them talk like whales; and there are times when, 
turning over Washington's private correspondence, you can 
understand how Queen Victoria felt about Gladstone. She said, 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 13 

"I do not like him because he always addresses me as though I 
were a public meeting." (Laughter.) These things, however, 
that were characteristic of Washington after all were but the 
manners of the times. But whatever may be our mistakes 
about the detailed picture of these two men there is no question 
about the common character that underlies their lives. 

We may remember here today that there were many times 
during: the revolutionary war when the whole cause of Ameri- 
can independence rested upon the solitary will of Washington. 
If he had flinched the whole enterprise inevitably would have 
gone to pieces. He had everything against him: defeat, his 
army dwindling from thirty thousand to two thousand men, 
the Continental Congress hating him, and his enemies sure 
that they would dispossess him tomorrow. And he rode the 
storm like an iceberg down the sea against tide and tempest, 
because the deeper levels of it are laid hold on by a current 
that runs far beneath the surface. So he had not accumulated 
a little patriotism upon the surface of his life. His heart had 
been gripped by an overmastering devotion to an emancipated 
America. Because he was that kind of man we have the 
country that we rejoice in today. (Applause.) 

As Gladstone said, "One example is worth a thousand 
arguments," and because God has given us for the center of our 
national admiration two men like this, Lincoln the most lovable 
of all great men in history, Washington, concerning whom an 
Englishman, Frederick Harrison, said, comparing him with 
his own heroes like Oliver Cromwell, that in point of character 
he is the supreme statesman in the records of humanity, let 
us never fail to exalt them in the eyes of our youth that they, 
even before they can learn the abstract arguments for our 
institutions, may in their hearts fall in love with the men who 
made the institutions possible. (Applause.) 

In the third place, I call your attention to another deep 
need in our national life represented by this gathering today: 

the need of a new emphasis upon some of the fundamental prin- 
ciples on which our nation is founded. Let me pick out just 
one of them today — equality. 

I wonder what the average man thinks of the doctrine of 



14 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

human equality. I venture if you could get a rescript of what 
the average man thinks it might run something like this: he 
knows that the Declaration of Independence vouches for the 
fact that all men are born equal. He knows that behind this 
are Rousseau's ideas on liberty, fraternity, equality, which 
afterwards flamed out in the French revolution. Perhaps he 
knows that behind that, whatever its practice may have been, 
the church in theory had always taught human equality. 
Gregory the Great in the sixth century said, "All men by 
nature are equal." Perhaps he knows that even before the 
Christian Church came into existence that marvelous civili- 
zation which grew up around the Mediterranean basin, with 
open avenues between the peoples and such a mingling of races 
as the earth had never seen before, had developed the 
Stoic doctrine of human equality, so that Cicero had said that 
there was no such resemblance to be found in nature as that 
between man and man and nowhere was equality so complete. 
But after the average man, even in America, has recognized 
thus the important history which this conception has had, I 
wonder if he does not go on to say: "It is not so; men are not 
equal. A man into whose life has been poured generations of 
cultural wealth and a man born in a jungle — equal? A born 
genius and a dunce — equal? When you have abstracted from 
humanity all the ways in which we are unequal, what you have 
left concerning which you can saj' in this regard we are equal 
is thin and insubstantial, an airy sentiment for dreamers to 
talk about, but not for practical men to live by." Thus one of 
those great principles that our fathers wrought into the very 
structure of the country has come even in America to be 
openly discounted. 

I call your attention, however, to the fact that this idea 
of human equality is a long way from being a sentimental 
dream. It has already demolished old caste systems although 
they seemed eternal. Go to India and see them still lingering 
on, caste systems strict and absolute, by which the people 
for uncounted generations have been organized into rigorous 
inequality. Some men were born from God's head, they say, 
some from his arm pits, some from his navel, and some from 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 15 

his feet, and so, by eternal nature, they are unequal, they and 
their children after them. At any rate, with all our personal 
differences, that sort of thing has gone down before the ideal 
of equality. 

The ideal of equality a sentiment! But chattel slavery 
has gone down before it. Aristotle argued that slavery ethi- 
cally was right because men were essentially and unchangeably 
masters and slaves by nature. Somehow, that would not even 
sound plausible to us although the greatest mind of all anti- 
quity did say it. For millions of lives have been gambled upon 
the proposition that whatever may be the difference between 
men and races, the difference is not sufficient to justify the 
ownership of one man by another. The ideal of equality a 
sentiment! Well, it is a sentiment then to stand in awe of, 
for it has utterly wrecked old aristocracies that seemed to 
have firm hold on permanence. If one would feel again what 
that thrilling generation felt when first the old distinctions 
lost their power, one should read once more the songs of Robert 
Burns. They are commonplace to us now, but they were not 
i;ommonplaces then. They were like lightning a great beacon 
on a hill. 

"For a' that and a' that 

Their dignities and a' that, 

The pith o' sense and pride o'worth. 

Are higher rank than a' that." 

The ideal of equality a sentiment! But it is a most prodi- 
giously powerful one for it has already made equality before 
the law one of the maxims of our government, failure in which 
awakens our apprehension and our fear. It has already made 
suffrage an actual fact, although all the practical people only 
yesterday laughed at it as a dream. It has already made 
equality in opportunity for an education the underlying postu- 
late of our public school system, although seventy-five years 
ago the debate was still acute as to whether such a dream ever 
could come true. Just now the idea that equality is a senti- 
mentalist's dream sounds strange when little nations are 
claiming equal rights and proletarian uprisings are advertising 



16 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

how profound and how prodigious is this passion in the hearts 
of men. 

One with difficulty restrains his scorn for the intellectual 
impotence of the so-called wise men who call idealists dreamers. 
Who is it that is dreaming, if he despises an ideal whose up- 
heavals already have burst through old caste systems, upset 
old slave systems, wrecked old aristocracies, pushed obscure 
and forgotten masses of mankind up to equality in court and 
election booth and school and now once more are disturbing 
the very foundations of old international and economic ideas. 
This is a poor time to despise that ideal. It is a very good time 
to try to understand it if one can. For so deep in the essential 
nature of things is the fact of mankind's fundamental equality 
that no more revolutionary force ever yet was let loose in 
history and no stronger influence will sway the developments 
of the future. Those old words of Archie Roosevelt to his 
school teacher when she rebuked him for playing with common 
boys might well be put up on every school house and church 
and public buildings: "My father says that there are only 
two kinds of boys, — good boys and bad boys." 

There are times yet, for all that the Reds say, when my 
heart is stirred to the depths by the practical evidence of what 
this thing means. A few years ago there landed in the port of 
New York a lad from Sicily. On the day he came the streets 
were gay with banners; it was the happiest day in the boy's 
life because he thought the flags were flying to welcome him 
from far off Sicily. In a few months he found himself down 
on the East Side, in one of our American schools, having diffi- 
culty with the language. One day he brought to the teacher 
a beautiful piece of pottery on which with skillful fingers he 
had moulded a scene from his native land and, because she was 
a real teacher and loved to bring out what was in her pupils, 
she rose like the sun in encouragement upon his work. To make 
a long story short he is studying now in Beaux Arts and has 
the promise of going to Rome to complete the development of 
the unusual talent for sculpture that has been discovered in 
him. He says now that he knows those flags were not flying 



ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 17 

for him ; he knows that it was Lincoln's birthday ; but he thinks 
that after all there is a sense in which they were flying for him 
because America has given him the kind of welcome that Mr. 
Lincoln would have been glad to have him get. (Applause.) 

Between twenty and thirty years ago there landed in the 
port of New York a young Hungarian from up in the Carpa- 
thian Mountains. He came without family and money and be- 
cause he had heard that all wealth came from Pittsburgh he 
went there. He was too young to go into the mills but he was 
finally introduced into the kitchen of a hotel to wash dishes. 
Then he began to size up what made the superiorty of America 
and he put his fingers on education. He worked by day and 
studied by night. When he graduated from the high school 
he was chosen to be one of the orators. He took as his subject 
"The Great Opportunities that America Gives to the Boys 
Who Come Here." He worked his way through one of the 
universities and graduated with honor; he worked his way 
through Harvard Law School. He is with a leading firm on 
Broad Street, New York City, now, and a week ago I had the 
privilege of writing a letter recommending him for admittance 
into the New York Bar Association. (Applause.) 

Just this last week I was up at Yale University. As some 
of you know, at Yale there are fraternities to which young men 
of the most well-born and wealthy families would be glad to be 
invited. A few weeks ago, from one of these, some members 
went out to notify those who had been invited to their fellow- 
ship. Where did they go? To a New Haven restaurant — and 
asked a waiter serving his patrons there if he would join their 
fellowship. He was a boy from Greece who had landed here 
eight years ago without family and without funds. He had 
worked his way through Yale waiting on a table in a public 
restaurant and two weeks ago, when the day's work was done, 
he laid aside his apron and went up to one of the greatest 
fraternity houses on the campus and the two men who led him 
up to the altar of initiation bore names eminently known in 
America for generations. The Reds may say what they like, 
but for men who mean business there never was such a place 



18 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

of open doors as in this land. (Applause.) 

We have been looking back to the great sacrifices, to the 
great personalities, to the great principles, that have been built 
into our national life. Let us take one look ahead, for, as 
George Eliot said, "The finest hope is fairest memory." Some 
of us need a basis for hope concerning things ahead just now. 
The world's situation is not encouraging. Herbert Hoover is 
telling us that in Vienna and twenty other cities on the con- 
tinent this winter four out of five children will have to get 
their food outside of their families at the hands of strangers. 
Supposing that a few years ago you had gone to wealthy and 
aristocratic Vienna and had predicted this situation. Incredi- 
ble! Suppose that one should say to America that that situa- 
tion ever could come here; how incredulous we would be! Yet 
the same force that wrought that consequence in Europe still 
stalks the earth, his hands unbound, his claws undipped — 
militarism; militarism that in days of peace says, "Build me 
vast armies, spend as much upon a single dreadnought as would 
remake the educational system of a whole state;" militarism 
that in days of war says, "Give me your best sons for slaughter 
but keep back the defective to breed the race that is to be;" 
militarism that lays its greedy, avaricious hands on every new 
invention to make gregarious death more swift and horrible; 
militarism that when war is over plunges whole continents 
into immedicable poverty and makes the starved bodies of 
innumerable children walk in its train of pageantry. The force 
still stalks the earth. You know well, whatever political parties 
you belong to, that with reference to this colossal problem we 
in America have been jockeyed by personalities, policies and 
politics into a position which absolutely misrepresents what 
the heart of America would like to say to the world. 
(Applause.) 

The Hottentots call themselves the men of men; the Es- 
quimaux call themselves the chief people; the Haitians always 
believed that their island was the first created of all existence 
and that out of one cave came the sun and moon and out of 
another cave came the race of men; the ancient Japanese be- 
lieved that Nippon was the center of the world; the ancient 



ADDRESS OF HAKia EMEUSON KOSDICK, D. D. 19 

Chinese said that China was the yolk of the world's egg; and 
the Shah of Persia, if there is any such person now, still bears 
the ancient title "Center of the Universe." "Wonderful patriot- 
ism," some people say! Patriotism? That is not patriotism. 
That is illiterate provincialism; and when an American says 
that or a Briton or a German or anybody else, it is illiterate 
provincialism still ! Yet we have been jockeyed into a position 
here in America where we seem to multitudes outside of 
America to be taking that attitude. 

On a day like this we naturally remember those splendid 
and wise words of Washington about no entangling alliances. 
We know the background of it; that there had been a tremen- 
dous pressure of public sentiment here that we should join in 
the war on France's side against England, and how with a 
preternatural courage and wisdom George Washington and 
Alexander Hamilton had stood against that burst of public 
sentiment because they knew that the only possibility of saving 
this little nation lay in no entangling alliances. Then, as a 
result of the Revolutionary War, we moved back to the Miss- 
issippi; we purchased Louisiana from France; got Texas from 
Mexico; obtained the California district to the ocean by pur- 
purchase and Oregon by discovery; until we stretched three 
thousand miles from sea to sea. And still we said, "No entang- 
ling alliances." In 1867 we purchased Alaska from Russia, until 
with our finger tips we touched Asia, and still we said, "No en- 
tangling alliances." In 1898 we obtained the Philippines and 
became a first class Asiatic power; took Porto Rico, laid a 
fatherly hand on Cuba, possessed ourselves of Panama and be- 
came a first-class South American power, until that thing 
became true of us that had hitherto been true only of the 
British Empire, that the sun never set on our possessions. 
And still we said, "No entangling alliances." And all the while 
other factors were at work; steamship lines, railroads, tele- 
graphs, telephones, wireless, binding the whole world into one 
bundle, until New York City spoke every language under heaven 
and the roofs of Buddhist pagodas in Thibet shone with the 
corrugated tin of Standard Oil cans. And still we said: "No 
entangling alliance's." 



20 ADDRESS OF HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, D. D. 

My friends, we may be able to go on with that farce in our 
politics for a little while longer, but it does not correspond 
with the realities. I never thought that the League of Nations 
covenant as framed at Versailles ought to be accepted un- 
amended. I always thought that there were changes that were . 
necessary. But whether you call it a league of nations or an 
association of nations, I care not; sooner or later the United 
States must give up its dream of splendid isolation and move 
out to cooperate with other nations in the endeavor to put an 
end to this ruinous thing that will destroy civilization if we 
do not end it — the building of vast armaments where we com- 
pete people against people. (Applause.) 

I had a friend once who went up to the Adirondacks. He 
was a minister and he was invited one Sunday to preach in a 
little chapel; so he took his nine year old boy by the hand and 
walked across the fields. As he went up the steps of the 
chapel he saw a box marked "Offerings," and he took out fifty 
cents and dropped it in the box. He went in and preached. 
The congregation dwindled away after the service until at last 
he and the boy and the clerk were left, and the clerk said, 
"I do not know how much we can give you for preaching this 
morning bat if you will step outside we will see." So they 
went outside and the clerk opened the box and took out fifty 
cents and gave it to the minister. As they were walking 
back across the fields a long silence fell upon my friend and 
his little boy until at last the youngster looked up into his 
father's face and said, "Father, if you had put more in you 
would have gotten more out." (Extended laughter and 
applause.) My friends, that is a whole philosophy of life and 
God pity us in America if as citizens we do not learn it. If 
you put more in you get more out. (Applause.) 



84 











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